What is the hottest problem for freshman supervisors in supervision? The statistics of the survey from “The First Freshman Supervisors’ Meeting of 2008” by the Office of Student Affairs indicated that many supervisors had responded that how to understand students newfangled “in” language and find out the ways of communicating with students born in the 80th would be the biggest problems. Not understanding their newfangled language, many supervisors could not effectively supervise the freshmen; rather they sometimes became ridiculed by their own answers to such newfangled expressions.

Counseling Section explained that out of 186 freshman supervisors, 134 (72%) took part in the meeting. The participating rate was better than that of last year. Many supervisors were very worried about communicating with the newly enrolled freshmen. According to the statistics by the Counseling Section of the Office of Student Affairs, 38% of the supervisors hoped to have topics relating to interpersonal communicating skills while 21% hoped to have counseling skill discussions in the next meeting. 17% would like to have topics on skills to handle common psychological problems of students.

Counseling Section Chief, Yen-wei Hu mentioned that some supervisors did not even know the meanings of some most newfangled terms such as “hang” (hot, popular), “zheng-mei” (beautiful girls), they certainly could not help students solve their problems. So they suggested interpersonal skills of communicating with new students be the main focus of discussion in the next meeting. She pointed out that if supervisors could adjust themselves, overcome the barriers in communication, they would integrate themselves into the students’ world, and achieve better result in supervision.

Chair of the Department of Business Administration, Ying-chen Hung has 12 years of supervising experiences and also offered psychology related courses. He called on the supervisors: “As the ways of thinking of the younger generation changed fast, generation gap became wider. Only by integrating ourselves into students’ ‘sub-cultural world’ and really caring for their various interests in life, could we have ‘ma-ji’ heart-to-heart communications with the young students.” He mentioned his experience of dealing with the newfangled “Mars language.” Once, a student joked, telling him, “Teacher. You are ‘bei biao le’ (bitched)!” He was very “three-lined” (embarrassedly puzzled). He did not understand what the student had really meant. After he asked other students about it, he finally knew the student meant: “You are fooled.”

Sophomore Supervisor, Assistant Prof. Chuan-yang Xu said that through other students, he “indirectly cared” for those students with whom it was difficult to communicate. In other words, if a student did not really want to open his/her heart to the supervisor, the supervisor would ask other students to help him/her. Prof. Chuan-yang Hsu believed, “Growth needs time.” As to the newfangled alien language, Prof. Hsu applied the way of “teaching through learning.” He smilingly mentioned that a student once told him that he was “lao-geng” (pedantically stiff), and he was fogged. He immediately asked other students about it after class. Thus he bridged the generation gap by learning to decode students’ newfangled language. He also makes friends with students by inviting them to play volleyball. A student from the same department, Jie-lin Huang said, “Although he is not my supervisor, by playing volleyball with him, we established a friendly relationship.”

In addition, the Counseling Section appealed that if supervisors found any students not studying well not because of studying skills but because of bad time management and other factors, they could introduce those students to the Counseling Section. Together with the supervisors, the Section would try to help students with their problems in study. ( ~Dean X. Wang )